About

Who am I? The short version

I believe that kids deserve awesome things to watch, play with, and learn from.

I have spent the last decade working in children’s media at companies like Sago Mini, Common Sense Media, Nickelodeon, YouTube, Google, Highlights, and at the kids cooking company I started myself, Nomster Chef. I graduated from the Stanford Learning, Design and Technology master’s program in 2015, and majored in Television Production at Ithaca College. I live in the Philly area with my husband and daughters.

Who am I? The long version

I got the media bug early when I joined my high school’s student-Emmy-winning TV club. So, it was an easy decision to major in Television-Radio at Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications, one of the best communications programs in the country. While at Ithaca, I interned for various television productions, including Comedy Central’s "The Colbert Report."

Cookie Monster was a guest on “Colbert” one day during my internship, and I realized that I was more excited to meet him than I was to meet any other celebrity (including Stephen himself). I thought about all the work I had done with children throughout my life, and decided to combine my passions and work in children’s television.

I worked on the production of Nickelodeon’s "Team Umizoomi," a TV show that teaches math to preschool-aged children, for four years. Besides learning about animation production, I also learned that I loved working in educational media. After “Team Umizoomi,” I worked for an app startup called PlaySquare, where I helped create apps based on PBS Kids’ preschool literacy show "WordWorld."

In 2014 I decided to go back to school so I could learn more about child development, educational psychology, learning technologies, and the tech design process. I earned my master's degree in Learning, Design and Technology from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education in August 2015. At Stanford, I focused on technology use in early childhood education, and my master's project was the early version of my company, Nomster Chef.

After graduation, I worked at YouTube Kids as a User Experience Research Assistant, where I learned a ton about UX research for both kids and adults. I couldn’t stop thinking about my master’s project though, so I applied to the Education Design Studio EdTech incubator at the University of Pennsylvania.

I was one of 7 teams chosen for the incubator, and so when I joined the 2016 cohort I officially began Nomster Chef as a company. Nomster Chef is a website that teaches kids and their grown-ups to cook and love healthy food. In 2017 I launched a successful Kickstarter campaign that was recognized as the worldwide “Project of the Day” by the Kickstarter staff, and in 2018 the full Nomster Chef product was launched. I wound down the company in 2020, but the materials are still live on the website for families and educators to use for free. (And here’s what I learned about running a company, if you’re interested.)

My first book, a cookbook for kids, was published in December 2019. My second and third books, advice books for kids getting a baby sibling, were published in June 2020 (and have 1600+ reviews with a 4.6/5 star rating on Amazon).